The Secret Sauce In Marlborough | On the line at the Ken's Foods plant
I know what to expect when it comes to food manufacturing plants. At least I thought I did.
My father is a mechanic in a food manufacturing plant, so I’ve seen the massive quantities of ingredients. I’ve seen how those ingredients arrive at the plant and how they’re handled once they arrive.
So, when I walked into Ken’s Foods in Marlborough a couple of weeks ago, I expected it to smell like salad dressing.
Don Gillis, president of the Worcester and Central Massachusetts chapter of the Association for Facilities Engineering, was kind enough to invite me on a tour the association was taking of the Ken’s plant and I wasn’t the only one in the group of about 30 to be hit with the overwhelming aroma of barbeque sauce.
Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce, to be specific. It doesn’t come from Kansas City or Memphis; it comes from Marlborough.
Kicking The Tires
The guys I was with were keen to know about the facility’s 7000KVA power distribution system, its 10MMBTU/hr steam power plant, its 120TR warehouse refrigeration system, 1200cfm compressed air system or its 20KVA battery backup system. They are engineers and facilities managers, after all. Some of them even took a tour of the facility’s own wastewater treatment plant.
All of us were amazed, though, that those systems allow the Ken’s Marlborough plant — it has a plant outside Atlanta and one in Las Vegas — to ship 10 million pounds of product every week. The production line that fills the familiar 16 oz. plastic bottles of salad dressing does so at a clip of 300 per minute.
Mark Shaye, the Ken’s corporate engineer who led my tour group, said it’s almost impossible to eat at a restaurant without consuming a Ken’s product, whether it’s dressing or marinade or mayonnaise or cocktail sauce or tartar sauce or barbeque sauce.
The plant’s facilities engineer Mike Kolakowski recalled the company making Stop & Shop brand salad dressing for a time, which was only a matter of setting a production line to stop labeling bottles with the Ken’s label and begin applying the Stop & Shop label.However, Ken's Foods hasn't packaged "store brand" products at its Marlborough facility in a number of years.
During the tour, we saw pallet upon pallet of not only Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce, but Newman’s Own dressing, as well.
High Volume
And nearly as amazing as the sheer amount of dressing and stuff the Ken’s factory puts out is the number of different packages it puts all that stuff into. There are the familiar 16 oz. bottles, the newfangled “upside-down” bottles, gallon-size foodservice bottles, which are actually manufactured at the Ken’s plant by a local plastics company, the little foil pouches you get at fast food restaurants, round glass bottles for cocktail sauce and even the little plastic cups you get at some restaurants.
And it is a food manufacturing plant, so things have to be clean enough to eat off of, literally. Ken’s runs 24 hours, but the third shift is dedicated to breaking down and sanitizing the entire plant and putting it all back together and ready to run in time for the first shift.
Got news for our Industrial Strength Column? E-mail Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
Video Clip
Mark Shaye, a Ken's corporate engineer, explains the inner-workings of the production line that produces 16 oz. bottles of salad dressing.
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